Opening Balances

Any business that has recently switched to Zoho Books from another accounting software or from manually maintained books of accounts, will have to ensure that all details from the previous accounts are brought in. This includes all their previous inventory levels, sales and purchase details, customers and vendors, income and expense statements, miscellaneous journal entries and a lot more.

To ensure that all the data from your previous accounting software is available once you’ve switched to Zoho Books, you will have to enter all your opening balances.

Note:

  • If you’re switching to Zoho Books at the end of your financial year, all the closing balances of the previous year will be entered as your opening balances for the current year in Zoho Books.
  • If you’re switching to Zoho Books at during any time of the financial year, you can generate a Trial Balance to identify all the debit and credit balances of your accounts.

Points to Note Before Entering Your Balances:


Entering Opening Balances

Zoho Books by default has a list of accounts that are common to all businesses. The accounts are grouped into Accounts Payables and Receivables, Assets, Expenses, Liabilities, Bank Accounts, Equity and Income. Each account category has multiple accounts under them.

To enter your opening balances:

Entering Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable Balances

Accounts Receivable is the closing balance of the amount you receive from your customers in your previous accounting system. Whereas, Accounts Payable is the closing balance of the amount you owe your vendors in your previous accounting system. You can add the opening balance in one of the following ways:

Import opening balances of customers/vendors

If you have already added your customers/vendors, you will be able to import only their balances in the Opening Balances page. To do this:

Import Balances Choose File Import Balances

This will import all the opening balances of your customers/vendors and map them with the respective customers/vendors.

(or)

Import Your Customers/Vendors Along With Their Opening Balances

The easiest way to enter your opening balances is while you import your customers/vendors to Zoho Books. As you import your customers/vendors for the first time, you can also enter their balances there by saving your time from doing it again. To do this:

Import Customers Balances and Decimals

All your customers/vendors along with their outstanding opening balances will be imported to Zoho Books.

(or)

Enter Opening Balances Of Customers/Vendors Individually

If you want to enter the opening balances individually, you can do it while you create or edit a customer/vendor.

To Enter Opening Balances For A New Customer/Vendor

Other Details

The opening balance will be available in the Overview tab of your customer’s/vendor’s details section.

To Enter Opening Balances For An Existing Customer/Vendor

Insights:

  • Receivables in the contact overview page contains the total amount the customer owes you (for the invoices created) and also includes the outstanding opening balance you had added initially.
  • Payables in the vendor overview page contains the total amount you owe your vendor (for the bills created) and also the outstanding opening balance you had added initially.
Balances for Existing Customers Update Balances

Insight: Outstanding Opening Balance is the balance the customer owes you excluding the amount from the sales transactions created for them in Zoho Books. Each time you record a payment received (apart from the ones you record for the invoices you created in Zoho Books), the outstanding opening balance reduces.

Pro Tip: If you are an existing user of Zoho Books and have already entered the opening balance for Accounts Payable, you will not be able to import the vendor balances. To enable this feature, you will have to set your Accounts Payable balance to zero and refresh the page to get the link to import vendor balances.

Entering Opening Balances For Other Accounts

Other accounts include your assets and liabilities, income and expenses, bank balances, and equity. To enter them:

Other Accounts Debit/Credit Continue Confirm

Once you have updated all your balances, you will still be able to create transactions before the opening balance date using the Sync option.

Scenario: Let’s say your opening balance date is Feb 6 2024 and you missed recording a bill earlier on Dec 1 2023. You can immediately record the transaction in the bills page. The Sync option in the opening balances page sync all your data created before your opening balance date and adjust your balances accordingly.

Sync Accounts

You will also be able to make changes to your pre-dated transactions or delete them and sync your balances.

Creating New Accounts

In case your business deals with accounts other than the default accounts, you can create new accounts. To create a new account:

Fields Description
Account Name Enter the name of the account you would like to create for your organization.
Account Type Select the type of account under which you would like to classify your new account.
Description Enter a description about the account for handling any future references.

Insight: An account code is a unique combination of numbers and assigned to an account that can help to identify them..

New Account
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